Many of the media center features are only unlocked once you purchase a $60 USD yearly membership

Remember that slick DVR system to allow the recording of gametime videos, the voice-controlled channel guide (OneGuide TV), and the SmartMatch game match pairing service for the upcoming Xbox One? Well in turns out Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is not intending those features for everyone.

I. Pay or Get Out

In order to "unlock" them, you have to pay an extra $60 USD a year for an Xbox Live "Gold" membership. Xbox Live currently comes in two flavors -- "Free", which has no charges, and "Gold" which has an annual fee, but offers some unique perks (e.g. the free download of "Crackdown" currently available for Xbox 360 "Gold" level subscribers). The Xbox 360 did set a somewhat similar precedent; it only offers access to the Internet Explorer (IE) browser to "Gold" customers and only allows "Gold" level customers to have access to their Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) account via their console [source].

Microsoft currently has 48 million Xbox Live users. Of those an estimated 50 percent are "Gold" subscribers (Microsoft doesn't release statistics on the number of "Gold" subscriptions). For them this won't be an impedement.

Here's a list of some of the features Microsoft is placing behind a "Gold" subscription paywall.

But for the "Free" members or those who don't use the Xbox Live network at all -- which account for an estimated 24 million + Xbox Live "Free" users, plus the estimated 30 million some Xbox users [source] who don't subscribe to either service, your console will lose some of its key selling points.

Another controversy is over the cloud gaming features of the Xbox One. The console has the ability to offload computations to the cloud, which Microsoft claims will make the console five times as fast, allowing for much better games. Experts like John Carmack of id Software have called shenanigans on that claim, saying the Xbox One was on par with the PS4, even with cloud computing considered. But what cloud offloading will certainly do is offer gamemakers an easy route to make their games unplayable offline. One Microsoft executive was quoted as saying that he "hoped" gamemakers would use cloud computing to make their games unplayable offline.

PS4 devs in theory could also use cloud computing, and even potentially make their games unplayable offline. However, it would be much harder to do so as Sony does not provide them with pre-packaged APIs for this purpose, meaning they'd have to write their whole offloading backend themselves.

In the good news column Microsoft did confirm that the Xbox One's latest hardware build received a GPU speed bump, which put it virtually neck-and-neck with the PS4's GPU. That would explain where John Carmack's commentary that the consoles were pretty much identical in computing power came from.